📜 RFC Editor Index Scraper

🚀 Export the full IETF standards catalog in seconds. Pull 9,700+ RFCs with titles, authors, status, stream, abstracts, and obsoletes/updates relationships. No login, no manual XML parsing, no broken anchor links.

The RFC Editor Scraper exports the canonical Internet standards index and returns 23 fields per record, including RFC number, title, full author list, publication status, document stream, publish date, page count, abstract, DOI, keywords, obsoletes and updates relationships, errata flags, and direct links to HTML, PDF, TXT, and JSON formats. The underlying index is the authoritative catalog of every published Request for Comments since RFC 1 in 1969.

The catalog spans 9,700+ documents, six document streams (IETF, IAB, IRTF, Independent, Editorial, Legacy), and eight publication status tiers. This Actor turns the official document index into a downloadable dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML in under five minutes. Three query modes let you pull by RFC numbers, keyword, status, or stream.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Protocol developers, network engineers, security researchers, standards bodies, technical writers, library scientists	Spec auditing, obsoletes-chain tracing, BCP discovery, citation management, internal knowledge bases, compliance checklists

📋 What the RFC Editor Scraper does

Three retrieval workflows in a single run:

• 🎯 Direct lookup. Pass a list of RFC numbers like [791, 2616, 9110] and get those records.
• 🔎 Keyword search. Filter the index by title or abstract keyword (case-insensitive).
• 🏷️ Status & stream filters. Restrict to Internet Standards, Proposed Standards, Best Current Practices, or any of the six streams.

Each record bundles identifiers (RFC ID, number, DOI), publishing metadata (status, stream, publish date, page count), authorship, full abstract text, relationship chains (obsoletes, obsoletedBy, updates, updatedBy), keyword tags, errata flag, and download links to HTML, PDF, plain text, and JSON formats.

💡 Why it matters: the official index is split across XML files, sub-series indexes, and a website with no bulk export. Tracing which RFC obsoletes another, or finding every BCP in the IRTF stream, normally means writing parsers against undocumented XML. This Actor returns a clean structured dataset in one run.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: abstract, authors, doi, errata, formats, htmlUrl, jsonUrl, keywords, number, obsoletedBy, obsoletes, pages, pdfUrl, publishDate, rfcId, scrapedAt, seeAlso, status, stream, title, txtUrl, updatedBy, updates. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the RFC Editor Index Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pass RFC numbers directly, or filter by keyword, status, and stream.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your dataset.
5. 📥 Download. Grab results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the RFC Editor, the IETF, or any of its contributors. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open standards data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.